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A WILLING REUNION NOT 

IMPOSSIBLE. 



A THANKSGIVING SERMON PREACHED AT ST 
PAUL'S, BROOKLINE, NOVEMBER 26, 1863, 



Rev. FRANCIS WHARTON, 



KECTOR OF THE PAlilSH. 



PUBLISHED BT THi: VESTRY, 




BOSTON: 
E. P. BUTTON AND COMPANY, 

€:f)ut-ci) 33ui)lisluvs. 
1863. 



' K 55 



RIVEHSIDE, cajibriuge: 
I'KI.VTEU BY H. O. HOUGHTON. 






Brookmne, Thanksgiving Day, 
November 26th, 18G3. 
Reverend and dear Sir: — 

Having listened with great interest to the sermon preached by jou 
this morning, and believing that it is well calculated to promote cor- 
rect views upon the National affairs of the day, we respectfully request 
a copy for publication. 

AUGUSTUS ASPINWALL, ~ 

HARRISON FAY, 

JAMES S. AMORY, 

J. A. BURNHAM, 

AMOS A. LAWRENCE, Wardens and Vestry 

FREDERICK P. LADD, of St. Paul's Church. 

WILLIAM ASPINWALL, 

M. C. FERRIS, 

HENRY UPHAM, 

THOMAS PARSONS, 



Rev. FRANCIS WHARTON, 
Brooklines Mass. 



THANKSGIVING SERMON. 



" In the shadow of thy wings will I rejoice." — Ps. Ixiii. 7. 



It is the usage of the divine Word to speak of 
God's mystery as the beHever's peace. Conceal- 
ment, we are told, is a part of the glory of God ; 
and the very darkness, therefore, in which our 
path may be enfolded, leads us to trust in God, 
who is in the cloud. " Thou canst not see my face," 
said God to Moses, "for there shall no man see 
me and live." " And it shall come to pass, while 
my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a 
cleft of the rock, and will cover thee with my 
hand as I pass by," — hiding thus from the crea- 
ture the movement of the Creator, even when the 
Creator is most near. So the apostle cries, — 
"• Oh the depth of the riches both of the wisdom 
and knowledge of God ! how unsearchable are 
his judgments, and his ways past finding out ! For 



of him, and through him, and to him, are all things; 
to whom be glory for ever. Amen." And in the 
same strain of praise for this, the hiddenness of 
the providence of God, the Psalmist exclaims, in 
the words of the text, — "In the shadow of thy 
wings will I rejoice." 

I think, dear friends, in the first place, that this 
must be the behever's cry in reference to the 
shadows that hung over him during former parts 
of his pilgrimage, but which are now passed. Few 
of us but must recall moments when we seemed 
placed in the cleft of the rock; and, like one pent 
in between the rugged walls and the beetling roof 
of some dark sea-side cave whose mouth the waves 
wash, could then see no path of escape. Yet, as 
we now view these moments of depression or 
affliction, what is our present cry? Do we not 
feel that even for these we can praise God? Do 
we not see that he whose paths are on the sea, 
and whose footsteps are not known, led us forth 
by a way of which we knew nothing? "Before 
I was afflicted I went astray, but now have I 
kept thy word." We now see that our plans, 
which we so much cherished, were very different 
from God's plans, which we did not understand ; 
and that our plans would have led to ruin, but 



God's have led to peace. We see that, whenever, 
in our own presumptuous wisdom, we chose our 
own path, against his obvious leadings, it led to 
sorrow, if not to sin ; and that God's discipline, 
which tore us, bleeding as it were, from ties in 
which we had thus wrapped ourselves, was the 
way of right and of love. We see that even God's 
providence of affliction, in removing from us beloved 
and believing friends, was a providence of mercy, 
— completing the number of the elect, adding to 
the glory of heaven, weaning us from earth. We 
see how even our own sicknesses and disappoint- 
ments have been blessings, warning us, as we grew 
older, not to attach ourselves to the transitory 
things of earth, but to place our affections on 
heaven. In the shadows of the past we can, there- 
fore, rejoice in the light of experience ; and so 
Faith teaches us to rejoice in the shadow of the 
present, grievous as may be the affliction or sore 
the trial. For the shadow is the covering of God's 
wing. 

But if such be the case with personal troubles, 
how much more strongly must it be so in refer- 
ence to those which strike, not merely individuals, 
but nations, — nations whose destiny involves, not 
only that of multitudes of individual souls, but, in 



a large measure, tliose of Christ's militant church. 
It IS true, that, in our own case, as our country 
stands on this Thanksgiving day, the shadow over 
us is not unbroken. We look back, as we close 
this beautiful autumn, upon a harvest of singular 
fulness. In no time has wealth poured itself so 
abundantly upon our great marts; at no former 
period has the giant growth of our giant country 
been so marked in this, the favored region in 
which we live. And we see this growth and 
this flush not only in our business, but in our 
educational and ecclesiastical interests. Our schools 
were never so full, our religious contributions never 
so large, the mental activity of the country never 
so great, as now. And yet, as we view all this, 
we turn with a sigh to the one great and over- 
whelming grief that overshadows us : a country 
divided into two hostile camps, and divided by a 
chasm into which not merely wealth, but life, is 
swallowed up in the costliest libations ; a people, 
only a few years since united in affection and 
peace, now apparently separated by an enmity even 
unto death. In this, the shadow of God's wing 
on our land, what reason have we to rejoice ? By 
these, the waters of Babylon, -in this, the strange 
land of discord in which we now find ourselves,— 



how can we, as a nation, raise the voice of praise ? 
This question let me now attempt to consider. 

And first, in these, our national trials, we are led 
to contemplate heaven as the sole country which 
cannot be disturbed, and God as the sole ruler 
whose supremacy cannot be touched. Each form 
of human government has been successively shaken 
to its centre. The military despot, the constitu- 
tional king, the little community in which each 
man has an equal share of power, the vast cen- 
tralization, where the aristocrat acts and speaks for 
all ; — each, in turn, has yielded to that law which 
stamps imperfection on all the institutions of man. 
And now, our own system, of all others the most 
perfect, — of all others, that which best unites in- 
dividual liberty with governmental power, — speaks 
the same lesson. The genius of constitutional lib- 
erty stands by the camp, and tells us that not 
even the best of human governments is able, with- 
out force, to control human passion; that there is 
but one government that cannot be shocked, — that 
of heaven ; but one power in whose protection we 
can find peaceful refuge, — the power of God. In 
God, then, let our supreme dependence be placed. 

But, secondly, these national trials cannot be 
studied without seeing in them important political 

2 



10 

as well as religious compensations. I have never, 
from the beginning of this melancholy struggle, 
been able to conceive of the great country included 
between the lakes and the Gulf, and the Atlantic 
and Pacific, otherwise than as one. All tlie analo- 
gies of other countries forbid its division, unless 
division be followed by war which would last until 
the one part or the other is politically cancelled. 
In no case in Europe do we meet with two con- 
tiguous powers, unseparated by natural boundaries, 
maintaining their independence and their integrity 
untouched. Between France and Spain the Pyre- 
nees erect an almost imjDassable natural barrier, 
and, in addition to this, there is that moral sever- 
ance arising from difference of tongue ; yet France 
has, more than once, overrun Spain, and Spain has 
now sunk to a second-class power, virtually the 
dependent of France. In a still more active 
process of absorption, the principalities of Burgundy, 
of Navarre, of Normandy, were gradually so worked 
up into the body of the kingdom of France, by 
the mere energy of homogeneousness of language 
and contiguity of soil, that now even the old boun- 
daries are lost. Through the same process Wales and 
Scotland were united to England, Norway to Swe- 
den, Boliemia to Austria, Silesia to Prussia, and, in 



11 

the very few last years, Naples, Parma, Moclena, 
and Tuscany, to the new kingdom of Italy. If, in 
some of these cases, the fusion was produced im- 
mediately by war, the principle is the same ; for 
the only alternative to a peaceable union, when 
nature or art has erected no positive boundary, is, 
war to be continued until one party or the other 
gives way; and it is only by such boundaries, or 
by the joint guaranties of Europe's leading powers, 
that the smaller states of the continent are kept 
from immediate absorption in their more powerful 
neighbors. I do not say that this is right; but I 
do say that it is in obedience to one of those in- 
stincts of human society which it is as impossible 
to control as it would be to overrule that law by 
which the smaller particle gravitates to the greater, 
or the stronger force attains a supremacy over the 
weak. And peculiarly does this law seem to apply 
to this country, where there is not only no natu- 
ral boundary dividing North and South ; not only 
no dissimilarity in language, in religion, in histori- 
cal antecedents, in general policy of government, 
— but where the two sections are united by reci- 
procity of staples, where the Mississippi couples the 
lakes and the Gulf by one main commercial ave- 
nue, and where the Alleghany and Rocky hills 



12 

divide the country into valleys running north and 
south. There could be no permanent peace, were 
an artificial boundary cut through interests which 
would thus have such interminable causes of con- 
flict ; there could be no peace, without pohtical 
death, when peace involved a severing of the great 
arteries of national life : there can be no alterna- 
tive, as I conceive, between a federal union of some 
sort, and a series of exhausting wars, which must 
continue until the one side or the other obtain an 
ascendency which is final and complete. 

Nor do I see any answer to this, in the fact that 
such is now the antagonism between North and 
South, that a willing reunion under the same gen- 
eral government is impossible. Antagonisms no 
less bitter, — antagonisms often strengthened by 
difference of language, and of political antecedents, 
as well as by natural boundaries, which do not 
obtain among us, existed in all the cases of ab- 
sorption I have mentioned ; and yet, the great law 
of populations prevailed, and the contiguous lands 
were united. No execration of our own time could 
be more bitter than that with which the Welsh 
bards, as the prophets of Welsh patriotism, visited 
the English invaders : 

"Ruin seize thee, ruthless king, 
Confusion on thy banner wait," — 



13 

so they have been paraphrased by the poet Gray ; 
yet Wales soon began to exchange institutions 
with England, and, under a common government, 
to be fed by, and to feed, its wealth. No wail 
could be sadder than that of the Scotch minstrel, 
singing, as it seemed to him, the dirge of Scotch 
glory : — 

" Old times are passed, old manners gone, 
A stranger fills the Stuart's throne ; 
And I, neglected and oppressed, 
Long to be with them, and at rest." 

Yet soon, not only Highland hate and Lowland 
suspicion died out, but the poet's melancholy at 
the loss of Scotch independence and the departure 
of Scotch royalty, gave way to as proud a loyalty 
to the new empire as ever was felt to the old 
clan. 

If, five hundred years back, we should stand with 
Wycliffe in one of the cloisters of Baliol, we might 
hear him lamenting, as the chief obstacle to Brit- 
ish union against papal usurpation, not merely the 
feuds between York and Lancaster, but the terri- 
torial division of the land among distinct powers. 
" Here," he might say, " to the west, protected by 
dense forests, and shut off' by a barbarous language, 
lift up the Welsh princes a defiant brow. Between 



14 

us and Scotland rise the Teviot hills ; but more im- 
passable than these are the barriers of tongue, of 
habit, of bitter, relentless hate. It seems impos- 
sible," so he may reason, "that these barriers, so 
fatal to the true independence of this isle, should 
be removed ; and yet, while they stand, how can 
the great cause of truth prosper ? " So argued 
the wisest and most hopeful of WyclifFe's day, and 
of many a day following ; yet the time came when 
these barriers sank away, and these w^arring popu- 
lations were fused, under that invisible process of 
assimilation which territorial contiguity involves. 

Or let us, as illustrating the fugitiveness of the 
passions of civil, as distinguished from international, 
war, go to the battle-field of Newbury, at the be- 
ginning of the great military contest between Charles 
I. and his parliament. Let us there listen to Lord 
Falkland, the purest and most unprejudiced patriot 
of the day ; the one who most faithfully sought to 
preserve harmony by reconciling the two contend- 
ing factions, and who now, in utter despair of that 
country he so much loved, and of that peace for 
which he so much longed, is about to throw away 
his life on the spot where the carnage is threat- 
ened. "He lives too long who has survived his 
country," so we can hear him cry. " I see England 



15 

finally and definitely divided into two hostile clans. 
I see the torch of civil war handed down from 
generation to generation ; hatred has dug a pit be- 
tween brother and brother which they cannot cross ; 
hatred is to be the perpetual boundary-line which 
is to divide this people into two hostile camps ; 
each element has in it much that is true ; each is 
essential to England's prosperity: yet now, as it 
stands, I see only war until one or the other is 
extinguished, and unchecked despotism, or un- 
checked anarchy, rules supreme." Yet Lord Falk- 
land's o^vn sons might well have lived to see peace 
restored without either of these essential elements 
being extinguished ; to see Puritanism and Angli- 
canism, Eoyalism and Parliamentaryism, each surviv- 
ing the contest, to continue, by their own alterna- 
tions and interchanges, to build up English pros- 
perity ; and to witness a final settlement, in which 
each element, divested of the fiercer passions with 
which it was once mixed, would vie with the other 
in loyalty to a constitutional king. 

Nor, should we transport ourselves back to one 
of our New York or New England towns, at a 
period but a few years later, do we find political 
or social antagonisms less marked. New York ac- 
knowledged the supremacy of the Dutch crown. 



16 



New England acknowledged that of England ; and 
England and Holland were then at war. New York 
held to aristocratic, New England to democratic, 
institutions; and besides these political and social 
differences, the two countries were inflamed by the 
fiercest commercial jealousy. Perhaps nowhere, 
even in that hard age of dissension, could be found 
two contiguous populations more utterly unlike, 
and more heartily disliking each other, as well as 
politically more thoroughly antagonistic, than those 
then existing in New England and New York. They 
were separated by far greater dissimilarities than 
now are North and South ; and by equally bitter 
antipathies ; but the Revolution gave New York and 
New England one government and almost one heart. 
I see nothing, therefore, in the immediate ani- 
mosities of any two contiguous populations to pre- 
vent the operation of the great law of which I 
speak ; and, least of all, can I assign this effect to 
an animosity so sudden and recent as that now 
dividing North and South. We cannot forget that 
we are substantially one stock. There is scarcely 
a family which can go back three generations 
without coming to a common parent whose de- 
scendants are scattered north, south, and west ; and, 
underneath this surface antagonism, which is none' 



17 

the less bitter from the very nearness of those 
whom it now inflames, I do believe that there is 
in the American people a base of mutual affection 
and respect which will remain long after this strife 
is forgotten. In union were formed the impressions 
of our country's youth. The old man, Avhom you 
watch, retains his childhood's memories the most viv- 
idly ; the old friendships, the old scenes, the old sac 
rifices, are what gave his character its final, mould' 
And the old country will retain, I believe, its old' 
memories, when the transient fever of the present 
is long past. It will look back to that infancy 
when its two sections interchanged their sons; 
when Southern soldiers rallied under a New Eng- 
land captain, to reclaim their soil from the invader, 
and when Washington's majestic presence first made 
a New England army feel the grandeur and the 
strength of a united land. This consciousness of 
community of blood, of community of history, 
of community of religion, of community, it must 
needs be, of destiny, lies at the foundation of the 
American life ; and, fearful as is the present strug- 
gle, and resolute as should be our determination to 
maintain to the last the cause of authority and 
law, I see nothing in these, the divisions of the 
moment, that shows that, as to us, the great laws 



18 

of population are reversed, and that it is God's 
will that we should dwell apart. Once, it is true, 
in the world's history, God stretched a sea between 
two nations whom it was his will to separate ; and 
at his command the path he had opened through the 
waters was closed, and the waves lifted themselves 
up to execute his omnipotent decree. But he has 
laid down no boundary line between the North and 
South of this American race, but, on the contrary, 
in the councils of omnipotence, has knit together 
its rivers, its mountains, its history, its lineage, its 
religion, in one. When, therefore, we read this 
decree of reunion on nature's face, and in the 
country's real heart, and the page of the divine 
economy for the Christian future, we may even 
now, in these shadows of war, see God's wing, and 
rejoice in the hope that we will soon again, though 
with temper chastened, and energies refined, and 
institutions ameliorated, possess a united land. 

One or two practical points I will mention in 
conclusion. And the first is, that, as long as recon- 
ciliation is scorned, and a war for separation in- 
sisted on by those at arms against our government ; 
and as long, therefore, as war is necessary for our 
own deience, and for that of our country and 
homes, we are advised, by every principle of hu- 



19 

inanity and policy, that the war, on our part, 
should receive our united and unreserved support. 
"A great country," it was said by a master of 
statesmanship, "cannot wage a little war." Our 
own imperial attitude ; the desire to spare un- 
necessary bloodshed and cost ; the determination 
to avoid that border vindictiveness which marks 
a protracted and feeble contest, and the determi- 
nation, also, if w^e must have war, to have war 
disconnected with personal hate, — to have, in 
other words, battle, not assassination; the determi- 
nation to close, as soon as possible, the terrible 
suspense by which we are now^ overhung; — all 
these motives combine to urge us to collect our 
whole strength, and, in perfect union, so far as this 
immediate object is concerned, to stake everything 
on the result. 

And this brings me to a second point, — the 
wrong of giving way to feelings or expressions of 
personal bitterness towards those against whom we 
are thus arrayed. In the last publication I have 
seen of one whom I shall never cease to love and 
venerate, but who believing, as I think wrongly, 
at the beginning of the war, that the Union was 
finally divided, took his stand on the soil to which 
he belonged, — in the last publication of the late 



20 

Bishop Meade, of Virginia, he quoted an old prov- 
erb, that we should treat our friends as if they 
might some day become enemies ; and our enemies, 
as if some day they might become our friends; 
and he added, that while all our Christian hfe re- 
quired us to reject the first part of this maxim, 
the same Christianity required us to accept the 
second. And I would add to this, that not only 
Christian feeling, but national magnanimity; not 
only national magnanimity, but public policy ; — 
all these motives combine in teaching us to treat 
as those soon to become friends, those now mar- 
shalled against us as enemies. We should avoid, 
I think, not merely the language, but the temper, 
of recrimination, as prejudicial to our own success, 
— as forbidden by the first principles of the gospel 
' we believe. 

One other topic I cannot persuade myself to 
overlook. In addition to that care over our sick, 
wounded, and imprisoned soldiers to which the as- 
sociations of this day so impressively call us, there 
is a special work of cardinal importance to be per- 
formed to that large body of the African race now 
thrown upon us for support. The question is not 
one of theory, but of fiict. By the necessities of 
war, if not by our own voluntary political choice. 



21 

vast numbers of this docile and amiable but unhappy 
l^eople have been detached from their old homes, 
and are now dependent on us, not merely for their 
daily bread, but for that practical education which 
will enable them to sustain themselves in their new 
condition. It well becomes us, on this Thanksgiv- 
ing day, to consider what is due from us to this 
people, thus so solemnly consecrated to our care. 
And I do not hesitate to say, that this most deli- 
cate trust is one which we must make up our 
minds faithfully and religiously to discharge. We 
have now accepted the tutelage of this people, — 
a people whose capacities, great as the far past 
shows them to be, are to be recalled from the 
sluggishness into which they have fallen in the 
bondage of centuries ; and we have accepted this 
tutelage, as one of the elements of the restoration 
of our own political power. We have invited them 
to aid us : their men have fought for us on the 
battle-field, leaving their women and children to 
our care : both men and women are ignorant of 
the art of self-support, as well as destitute of its 
means ; and may God help us to do to them the 
right ! And, among the elements of this right, let 
me mention, not merely temporary aid, but the 
determination to remove that prejudice which in 



22 



the North, and particularly at the North- West, re- 
fuses to receive the negro as part of the industrial 
energies of the land. If, in the present state of 
the country, — if, in view of the liberty we are giv- 
ing to so large a part of the negro race, and the 
military debt we are accumulating to them, we do 
not remove this prejudice; if we do not receive the 
Africans to a free home, and to the full rights of 
labor in this our land, or, if that be impracticable, 
give them adequate homesteads elsewhere, — we' 
-shall, I think, be eternally branded as a nation dead 
to generous impulses, and unfaithfid to the most 
sacred trusts. The question is not the political 6ne 
of emancipating these particular slaves, for that is 
already done; but of saving those whom, for our 
own purposes, we have already emancipated from 
moral and physical ruin. To this work the intelli- 
gence and humanity of the country are most sol- 
emnly i^ledged. 

And now, as we separate, I recur once more to 
the comforting thought which the text brino-s. As 
our difficulties multiply; as problems, apparently 
msoluble,-such as that which concerns the destiny 
of this unhappy people, to whom I have just di- 
rected your thoughts, -as problems, apparently 
msoluble, start up in our path, we fall back on 



23 

this great truth : that God, who interposes the cloud, 
will, if we trust in him, open the way. The future 
will bring its solutions, if the present only bring 
its fliith. The very incomprehensible about us is 
a proof that it is God who is near, and who leads. 
It was a cloud that went, in the day, before Israel, 
as he marched from the land of bondage ; but this 
very cloud, in the night, when Israel would other- 
wise have died, became lit with flame, and led him 
in the path of the right. On Sinai, God spake his 
law from a thick cloud, in the midst of thunders 
and lightnings, and to the voice of a trumpet ex- 
ceeding loud : just as in the darkness and tumult 
of war by which we are now beset, he speaks to 
us. And even divine redemption is hid in the 
same shadow ; and, in the moment when the Lord 
is transfigured before his disciples, "a bright cloud 
overshadows them," and from this cloud the Father 
speaks, "This is my beloved Son." Be this com- 
fort, then, ours, — the comfort that God rules, and 
God redeems ; and let this comfort give us a tran- 
quil faith in God, and a resolute determination to 
perform those practical duties which in this emer- 
gency he prescribes. If so, it will be with no mere 
flutter of languid dependence, but in the courage 
of a determined and active heart, that, even m the 



24 



clouds of this Thanksgiving day, -clouds which 
though sunht by yesterday's victory are still dark, 
-we lift up our voice in triumph, and cry, « In 
the shadow of thy wings will I rejoice." 



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